Hundreds of hours of audio recordings of private meetings in which Nicolas Sarkozy, his close aids and Carla Bruni are heard talking, have been leaked to the French media.

Hundreds of hours of audio recordings of private meetings in which Nicolas Sarkozy, his close aids and Carla Bruni are heard talking, have been leaked to the French media.

Sarkozy’s own counsellor, Patrick Buisson, secretly kept a dictaphone, recording conversations over five years of Sarkozy’s tenure as president.

The former president and his wife are taking legal action. Their lawyer said they would seek an injuction to prevent more transcripts from leaking out. In one conversation Sarkozy says to Bruni that they are renting an apartment in Paris despite the fact that they have three official residences.

Bruni responds jokingly, “Ah yes but that’s because I maintain you” referring to her big fortune. Bruni also talks about how she was unable to sign big contracts unlike Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone and Julianne Moore but that once her husband would no longer be president, she’d start doing so again. In another recording, Sarkozy seems to refer to journalists as “those (expletive) barking dogs”.

His counsellors, talking to each other, call some cabinet ministers “super-useless”. Patrick Buisson, who recorded the conversations, says hewas simply doing so to keep notes.

Buisson is said to have pushed Sarkozy towards hardline right wing politics and is also implicated along with the former president in buying of opinion polls with tax payers money. All political parties in France have reacted to “Sarkoleaks” with anger.